The Amboy Dukes (novel)

The Amboy Dukes is a 1947 novel by Irving Shulman, his first.

The novel concerns the misadventures of a 1940s Jewish street gang of young toughs based on Amboy Street in the working class Brownsville section of Brooklyn (Brownsville, from its founding into the 1950s, was a primarily Jewish neighborhood).^[1] The gang, characters, and most of the story are fictional, but a key event of the novel – the murder of a high school teacher by two gang members – was based on an actual case.^[2]

The Amboy Dukes was considered somewhat outré, unsavory, and shocking for its time,^{[citation needed]} as it depicts its teenage juvenile delinquent protagonists fighting, smoking marijuana reefers, cutting class, using foul language, carrying homemade zip guns, having sex, abusing girls, and being generally vicious.^[3] It was sometimes banned from schools.^{[citation needed]}